Field of the Invention
The present disclosure pertains to the field of processing apparatuses and associated software and software sequences that perform mathematical operations.
Description of Related Art
As processor technology advances, newer software code is also being generated to run on machines with these processors. Users generally expect and demand higher performance from their computers regardless of the type of software being used. One such issue can arise from the kinds of instructions and operations that are actually being performed within the processor. Certain types of operations require more time to complete based on the complexity of the operations and/or type of circuitry needed. This provides an opportunity to optimize the way certain complex operations are executed inside the processor.
The display of images, as well as playback of audio and video data, which is collectively referred to as content, have become increasingly popular applications for current computing devices. Filtering and convolution operations are some of the most common operations performed on content data, such as image audio and video data. Such operations are computationally intensive, but offer a high level of data parallelism that can be exploited through an efficient implementation using various data storage devices, for example, single instruction multiple data (SIMD) registers. A number of current architectures also require unnecessary data type changes which minimizes instruction throughput and significantly increases the number of clock cycles required to order data for arithmetic operations.
In communicating various types of data, especially for audio/video, compression and encoding is heavily used to reduce the enormous amount of data to something more manageable. If the code is comprised of fixed length pieces, an algorithm for decoding and handling the code can be optimized as the code pieces are predictable. However, with variable length codes, the situation is more complex. The code for each symbol has to be properly recognized and decoded. Additional complexities are also introduced with variable length codes due to the bit granularity of symbols and the large possibility that these symbols do not align with a more manageable byte boundary.